[Gayalondiel]

This is already a quite heavy thread, but i'm going to stick my oar in anyway as theses are things i've never been able to tell anyone before, as it seems a bit silly to me. anyway, here goes...

Tolkien's writings have affected me quite profoundly in two major ways. Firstly was that i was always a loner as a child after my best friend moved away, i was good at work and grades but not so good at friendship. and although i was writing music, it always seemed about forth-rate to me. Reading fantasy books in general gave my imagination a bit of a kick-start, and also took a focus for my imagination so i wasn't always off in my own world and began to see things, including friendships, in a more realistic light. And recently my compositions inspired by LOTR have suprised me, i write things that i had no idea were there.
The second way is much harder to talk about, so forgive me if this is garbled. My grandmother died when I was 12, and from that point on my grandfather declined. I understand now what i couldn't see then, that the grief was too much for him to bear. but for a few years it seemed to my eyes that he was picking up, although i'm not sure now that he was. Anyway, january of two years ago he got very ill and went into a coma. after about a month he began picking up again, but one day he woke up enough to remove his life support apparatus himself, and died shortly after. (I know this seems completely irrelevent to tolkien, but i'm getting there). For a long time i just couldn't accept why he did that. It wasn't until i read the chapter on beren and luthien in the sil last year that i realised he'd died of a broken heart. Although he was in a coma for 8 weeks, he dies on the day of my grandmother's funeral. reading about luthien's sacrifice for beren i realised that was why my grandfather died, he couldn't be without his wife any more

crikey, sorry that was so long and kind of irrelevant. but i needed to say it. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]